Eternity was never quiet.
It hummed—an endless, perfect resonance woven from creation itself. Stars formed and dissolved within it like thoughts briefly entertained. Time flowed without urgency. Existence obeyed without resistance.
At the center of it all, Gale watched.
He had created worlds with a gesture once. Galaxies with a thought. Life had spilled from him not as effort, but as inevitability. Where he passed, reality aligned itself out of respect.
And yet—
He was alone.
Not isolated. Not abandoned.
Alone in a way only the infinite could be.
His siblings gathered across the Astral Confluence, their thrones forged from concepts mortals could never name. Light refracted into Luxariel's form, radiant and unyielding. Pyrrhos burned with restless impatience. Zephryne drifted, laughter threaded through wind and distance. Others watched in silence—gods of law, decay, tides, memory.
They had always been here.
They would always be here.
That was the problem.
"Creation slows again," Luxariel said, voice echoing across infinity. "You've not forged a realm in centuries."
Gale did not answer immediately. He was watching a mortal world—small, flawed, and achingly brief. A farmer laughed as his child chased wind across a field. A city burned somewhere else. Both moments were equally temporary.
"Do you ever wonder," Gale said at last, "what it feels like to be necessary?"
Pyrrhos scoffed. "We are always necessary."
"No," Gale replied. "We are inevitable."
The distinction unsettled them.
Zephryne tilted her head. "You're thinking again."
"I'm tired of thinking," Gale said. "I want to live."
Silence fell—true silence this time. Even eternity seemed to pause.
Luxariel's light sharpened. "You speak nonsense."
"I want days that end," Gale continued calmly. "Choices that matter because they cannot be undone. Pain that cannot be erased by will alone."
"You want limitation," a god of order said slowly. "You want death."
Gale smiled—not sadly, but honestly.
"I want meaning."
The Confluence erupted.
"You would abandon us?" Pyrrhos roared.
"You would fracture the balance," Luxariel warned. "Creation cannot simply—"
"I am not abandoning creation," Gale interrupted. "I am trusting it."
He stood.
The act alone sent tremors through existence. Seals formed around him—self-woven, precise, merciless. His authority folded inward, bound so tightly that even he would bleed if he forced it open.
"Do not follow me," Gale said, voice gentle but final. "Do not search."
Zephryne whispered, almost pleading, "You don't know what mortals do to gods who fall."
Gale looked back once.
"I do," he said. "That's why I'm going."
And then—
He stepped out of eternity.
No thunder marked his departure. No prophecy recorded it. The Confluence closed like water over a stone.
But across the realms, unseen by gods and mortals alike, something fundamental shifted.
Eternity blinked.
And somewhere in the world of Malan, a mortal child took his first breath—unaware that the god who had shaped everything had chosen to bleed beside him.